Creative drinking

Date: February 09 2013

Richard Glover

The popularity of tea in the 17th century, I read this week, was a crucial factor in the expansion of the slave trade. This made me feel guilty about my early-morning ritual - properly brewed tea sipped in bed while reading the newspaper and picking nits from my partner's hair.

In truth, I shouldn't feel too bad because I don't take sugar. The sugar, you understand, was the problem; the popularity of tea brought a surge in demand for a sweetener, which created the need for vastly expanded sugar plantations, which in turn led to a boom in the slave trade.

Coffee, meanwhile, is said to have had a much more noble impact on history. I remember a book from a few years ago in which the writer Tom Standage argued that coffee led to the Enlightenment.

Here's his theory: once coffee arrived in Europe, coffee shops started taking over from pubs as the place where people would meet and talk which meant people were no longer completely pissed when they tried to strike up a conversation. All over Europe, people suddenly started making sense instead of just sounding like your Uncle Terry midway through lunch on Christmas Day. Sober for the first time in six centuries, they rapidly came up with the idea of rational thought.

It's a tough comparison for those of us who prefer a nice cup of tea: on one hand you have Jean-Jacques Rousseau knocking back an espresso while inventing universal education; on the other, a bunch of tea-desperate Poms waving off a fleet of miasmic slave hulks in order to summon up their next sugary hit.

It does make you wonder if all human history is beverage-related. The history of the US, for example, begins with a protest over tea taxes (the Boston Tea Party) and presumably will end with its citizenry so fat from drinking Coke, they'll be unable to defend the borders. In Australia, on the other hand, we've gone from being a beer-drinking culture to a wine-drinking culture, which means we don't have to get up so often to visit the toilet, but we do talk a lot more rubbish while still sitting at the bar.

Speaking of beer, there's a good case its invention was the most important event in human history, beating the creation of the wheel, the printing press and the K-tel Record Selector. Before beer, people were forced to keep moving in search of fresh, clean water. Brewing allowed liquid to be safely stored, which in turn allowed settled agriculture, most of which - it was rapidly decided - would involve growing grain for more beer.

Beer became so plentiful that people needed to invent excuses to get drunk. Thus, they created the days of the week (''it's Tuesday, let's get pissed''); time zones (''it's 5pm somewhere''); and annual celebrations such as Christmas (''let's invite Terry around, he'll work his way through a fair bit of it'').

Later, human civilisation reached its high point with the creation of the beer commercial - an art-form in which unfeasibly large sums were spent helicoptering a donkey above football crowds, filling Manhattan with pink elephants, or building an animatronic tongue to crawl down stairs in search of amber fluid. This was to prove that (a) men are up for a laugh and (b) beer companies are not paying enough tax.

Is everything beverage-related? Certainly, it's hard to conceive of Hogarth's London without gin; Yeltsin's Russia without vodka; and the war between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden without teeth-gritting teetotalism on both sides.

Of course, in the end, beverages ran out of steam. They could only power so much of human history.

In recent years, coffee culture has become so complex that people no longer have time to talk about philosophical ideas - of equality, fraternity and freedom - as most of their time is spent delivering their order: ''I'll have a double-shot skim macchiato with a hazelnut shot,'' the modern-day Voltaire is forced to utter, ''while my companion, Monsieur Rousseau, would like a triple-shot, cinnamon piccolo latte half whole milk and half non-fat milk with whip, double-sleeved in an ecologically sustainable cup.''

No wonder people no longer have time to bash out anything half as good as Candide, Emile or the theory of the social contract.

It's even worse when you are forced to adopt the eccentric language of the coffee-shop chain-store. Once a person has uttered the words, ''I'll have a grande bold pick of the day with a treat receipt'', is he or she really in a position to ever again look reality in the face?

Yet, in 2013, perhaps small changes can still be produced by a change in beverage consumption. Since the alcopops tax, young Australians have abandoned pre-mix rum and coke and are instead drinking cider. They appear moderately less pissed and a little less punchy, but I do fear the imminent adoption of a Somerset accent.

As with the popularity of tea and coffee, the history of beverages is full of unintended consequences.

Twitter: @rglover702

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